“Well, you can do one now,” Ava told him. “I could write it up for you myself. And we’re gonna have plenty of photos to choose from tonight.” She had freelanced for the newspaper several times before.

  “Yeah, but how come we didn’t have a story before this event?” the representative argued.

  Thomas didn’t want to get into a war of words with him, but he didn’t see where their paper not having an article had hurt Ivan any. The place was packed.

  Thomas said, “Ivan’s still a young guy, Nathan. He’s not going anywhere. You still have plenty of time to write articles up on him.”

  Nathan said, “Yeah, but now it looks like we missed the boat on the first one.”

  “Not if you let me cover this event for you, you won’t. But it’s all on you,” Ava repeated.

  Henry had nothing to add. He only heard everyone out while bobbing from left to right to left, as if he were watching a tennis match.

  Back inside Ivan’s circle, an older woman complained, “Ivan, I am very sad that I did not arrive early enough to receive a gift bag to remember you by.”

  Ivan smiled and told her, “I’ll have one of our lovely assistants run and grab you one of the extras.”

  They had prepared an additional hundred gift bags just for the left-out latecomers who would ask for them.

  “Oh, thank heavens, and bless your soul, young man,” she responded. “Also, happy birthday. And congratulations on all of your success. I’m sure that your mother is very proud of you.”

  Ivan heard that and froze. He nodded and said, “I’m quite sure she is. Can you take her with you to get her a gift bag?” he asked his new Filipina assistant.

  “Oh, sure.”

  Ashley was there that night as well, working the crowd on the far left side of the room near the catered food. Money was money, so she chose to work that night. She remained upset with Ivan for playing her second to Lucina, but what could she do about it? Ivan and Lucina were partners, while she was only a part-time employee.

  Lucina looked over in Ivan’s direction to see how he was doing and noticed Randy and Ralph headed in her partner’s direction. She saw that and panicked.

  Should I intervene to steer the conversation, or stay out of it and see where it goes on its own? she asked herself. She quickly decided to stay out of it. Ivan could handle himself. And she would ask him about their conversation later.

  “Hey, Ivan, I’m Randy Sterling, and this is my partner, Ralph Collins, from Randy and Ralph Entertainment.”

  Ivan heard the name and nodded to them. “Yeah, I’ve heard about you guys. You’re always doing big things in the city.” They were two of the few people not dressed to impress that evening. Outside of their sports jackets, they looked pretty casual in their blue jeans, soft leather shoes, and button-up shirts.

  “Yeah, I hear you’ve been doing your thing as well,” Randy commented. “We used to partner up with Lucina ourselves.”

  “Yeah, whatever happened with that?” Ivan asked them. He had never talked with Lucina in detail about it. He wondered what their views of her would be.

  Ralph, standing a little shorter than Randy and with darker hair, answered the question. If Ivan had to guess, he would assume that Ralph was the numbers man, while Randy was the people person.

  “Well, we just started to cater to different clientele, and Lucina felt that she just wasn’t, ah, getting her full value’s worth.” He said, “But we’re glad to see that she’s working out well with you now. We’re happy for her.”

  Ivan nodded, wondering how much the two of them were worth. He estimated seven to fifteen million. They were among the lead concert promoters in the city. But they mainly dealt with pop and rock music, leaving the urban and ethnic crowds alone.

  Ivan projected, We probably can’t touch them on concerts right now. We still have a lot of work to do.

  Randy asked him, “So, who came up with this idea? Lucina?”

  Meeting face-to-face with these guys was the exact competitive situation Ivan had alluded to in his speech. He wanted to be extra-careful with everything he said to them.

  “Lucina has a lot of great ideas, but the network that I’ve been able to build through Hutch and Mitchell Accounting, the Tribune newspaper, the Urban League, all of my personal friendships, and the website has allowed us both to make the bigger ideas fly,” he told them. He added, “This is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re just getting started now.”

  Ivan wanted to protect himself and Lucina right away by name-dropping his accounting firm, the local media, and a well-established African-American business group, and hinting at his own friendships, website vehicle, and the fact that they planned to increase their promotional power within the city limits of San Diego. He wanted to establish a solid base.

  Ralph nodded and said, “That’s good. It looks like you’re building a strong team. So you guys will be doing mostly urban and R&B crowds? We hear you had Busta Rhymes, Timbaland, and, ah, Eve in town a few weeks ago.”

  Ivan smirked. He said, “You guys are paying attention to us like that? They were pretty much just hangout parties.”

  “Well, those hangout parties cause a lot of noise when you throw them in the Gaslamp,” Randy stated with a chuckle.

  Since Ivan was still relatively new to most of the club owners in the Gaslamp Quarter, he wanted to create an illusion of distance on those deals to see what would happen. Were Randy and Ralph friends or foes?

  “Well, I actually don’t decide on who comes in and where we have them. Lucina and the other promoters we work with are usually the ones who tell us what the crowd would like here, and I just follow their lead,” he told them.

  Randy nodded, comprehending everything. He figured Ivan was more of a freelance investor who was willing to drill in whatever direction he could to find some oil.

  He asked, “So, what are you thinking about going in on next? You know, we may be able to include you in on some things.”

  “Lucina, too?” Ivan asked them. It sounded like they wanted to be friends.

  Ralph said, “Are you guys, like, full partners, or do you just partner up on different projects? I mean, does she, like, own a piece of IDPromotions.com, or is that question getting too personal?”

  That’s the good old divide-and-conquer technique, Ivan told himself. Looks like they’re not friends with Lucina. He was nearly ready to smile in amusement. These guys were tremendously obvious. And if they could be that blatantly disrespectful to his partner, then why should he trust them?

  He answered, “Yeah, that is a little too personal there. But, you know, if you guys have something coming that’s big enough, where you feel that we could all make something off of it, then call me up and let’s talk.”

  Ralph looked around at Lucina’s girls and decided to hold his comments until they could have a more private meeting of the minds later.

  “All right, well, we’ll talk then,” he stated before handing Ivan his card. “I have my personal cell number on the back.”

  When they turned to walk off, one of Lucina’s assistants offered them each one of Ivan’s business cards.

  “No, we know how to get in touch with him,” Randy said, rejecting it.

  Yeah, fuck those guys, Ivan told himself. They’re typical white boys trying to snatch up all the marbles off the table.

  Before Ivan could even turn around, Lucina was right there beside him in a flash.

  “I want to talk about them later,” she commented, and walked away.

  Ivan grinned and chuckled. I can’t blame her, he told himself. It looks like the next level of business is about to get anxious now.

  Zee-Dog, Perry, Emilio, and some of the other Chargers and Padres players had formed their own huddle inside the room.

  “Yeah, this shit right here is definitely Jeffrey’s kind of party,” Perry grumbled. He watched as his teammate made business talk around the room with his fiancée in tow. He said, “They don’t have the right kind of music for me, or even dark enough lights in here.”

  Zee-Dog laughed and said, “It’s a network party, man. Folks wanna be able to see who they’re talking to.”

  “Well, as long as nobody’s asking me to sign any damn autographs in here, I’m cool,” Perry said.

  Emilio only listened to them and smiled. He dreaded not being able to bring Audrey, but she refused to come. She wanted to keep her distance from Lucina, Ivan, and the whole clan. She considered Emilio to be her protected prize now.

  “So, how do you guys feel about Ivan?” a bank executive asked John Hutch and Barry Mitchell in their own huddle.

  “He’s obviously a brilliant young man,” Barry commented. “Look how he’s brought so many of us together.”

  “And how long do you plan on being able to keep him under wraps?” the bank executive asked them with a smirk.

  John Hutch nodded. He said, “Now, that’s a good question. You don’t pull off a grand event like this and plan to stand pat. We haven’t tried anything major like this for ourselves.”

  Barry said, “I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out with him. He seems to be quite a reasonable guy.”

  John grinned and responded sarcastically, “Yeah, we’ll see real soon how that goes. But we can at least expect another twenty-five clients out of this that we’ll owe him credit for.”

  Chip, Mike, Dwayne, and a few of the other accountants from the office huddled near their bosses.

  “Can you believe this? Ivan was setting all of this up right under our noses,” Chip commented, as his eyes continued to follow Gretchen in her gold dress, as they had all evening. Mike and Dwayne took in everything in silence.

  Dwayne mused, There’s no coming back down from this. Ivan has put himself out there now.

  Carol, from the soul food restaurant in Old Town, whom Ivan continued to promote on his website, looked at her daughter Ida and asked her, “Are you sure you can’t work anything out between you and Ivan?”

  “Stop it, Mom,” Ida told her. “Now, I support what Ivan is doing for himself in business, obviously, but it stops there. And I have nothing else to say about it.”

  Carol heard her daughter out and shook her head. She’ll learn ten more years from now when she still feels lonely with a man at her side who doesn’t have anything in order.

  Just before midnight, the hotel catering staff wheeled out an enormous birthday cake with twenty-nine candles to light.

  Red Face Lion then made an announcement calling everyone together at the center of the room to sing “Happy Birthday” and watch Ivan blow out his candles.

  “Are you sure you want me to go through with this birthday cake thing?” Ivan whispered to Lucina. The idea seemed ridiculous to him. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to promote his age to everyone, either. Twenty-nine still seemed too young to be taken seriously.

  Lucina told him, “Ivan, trust me. You do this correctly, and it can easily become a yearly ritual. Singing ‘Happy Birthday’ is a big moment for everyone, especially at a large party like this one.”

  So Ivan went through with the ordeal, with the lights turned down low and everything. Red Face Lion led the song through his microphone.

  “Hap-py birthday to you…Hap-py birthday to you…Hap-py birthday dear I-van…Hap-py birthday to you.”

  Ivan took three big breaths to blow out all twenty-nine candles spread out on an extralong cake. It was decorated with his name, the IDPromotions.com logo, and their familiar website survey questions: “Who are you? What do you do? Let us know.”

  At the end of his big night, one of the gray-haired business guests, on his way out with his wife, shook his head at Ivan. He mumbled, “Twenty-nine years old. You got a long road of success ahead of you, son. You keep at it.”

  He added, “It took me to nearly thirty-nine years just to figure out what was going on. By that time I had made a hundred and three mistakes.”

  Ivan told him, “But the key is that you still found your way. I could have been doing this years ago myself. But I wasn’t supposed to be. I was supposed to be doing it now.”

  The older businessman nodded. He said, “That’s a very mature way of looking at it.”

  “It’s the truth,” Ivan told him. He smiled and added, “I needed to meet Lucina first.”

  WHEN IVAN AND LUCINA made it back out to the limo after one o’clock in the morning, his valet friend was still gathering cars for the many guests who were returning home.

  “All right, Ivan. Good luck with everything,” the guests continued telling him.

  “Thanks again for coming out,” Ivan told them back.

  His valet friend made an extra effort to make sure that he walked over to shake Ivan’s hand before he climbed into the limo behind Lucina.

  He said, “You’ve been a big inspiration to me tonight, Mr. David. I’ll always remember this for when I start to make my own plans happen.”

  Ivan said, “Do what you gotta do, man. Just don’t rush it. You let it all come to you the way it’s supposed to.”

  “I’ll make sure I will.”

  When Ivan climbed into the car with his exhausted partner, Lucina smiled at him meekly.

  “So, what are you planning to do now with the thousand business cards we collected tonight?” she asked him.

  Ivan said, “I’m gonna make a thousand business calls and see if I can pull together two thousand dollars from each business. That would be, what, two million?”

  Lucina winced and answered, “I think, yes.”

  Ivan said, “Well, that’s my new short-term goal. I wanna be a millionaire before this year is out.”

  Lucina said, “Well, if you make two million, that means that I’m a millionaire, too.”

  “Yeah, if you get involved in real estate with me,” Ivan pressed her. “But it’s not gonna happen through parties alone. Your guys Randy and Ralph have a big head start on us in that department.”

  “Yes, what did they say to you?”

  Ivan took a deep breath and told her, “Basically, they wanted to know the extent of our relationship, and if I was willing to break away from you to do things on my own. But I pretty much told them that I get all of my ideas from you and then shell out the money to back your genius. And at that point, they wanted to see if I would be willing to back them.”

  Lucina stared at him. She concluded, “So, you made yourself out to be the moneyman, while I would be the idea girl.”

  Ivan nodded. “Yup. That’s about it.”

  Lucina said, “Clever. So now you make us both valuable in different ways.”

  Ivan told her, “I couldn’t have done any of this without you.”

  Lucina shook it off, too tired to argue. It had been a long evening for both of them.

  She said, “You already had your website before I met you. You had your charm, good looks, drive, ideas, a following, intelligence, Hutch and Mitchell Accounting, and the Urban League.”

  “And none of that would have meant anything without the Chargers party, impulsive girls, my new look, confidence, game plans, and the pocketfuls of cash that you allowed me to share with you,” he countered with a smile.

  Lucina smiled back. “And you listened.”

  “And so did you,” he told her.

  Just that fast, they had pulled up to the front of his apartment building.

  Ivan looked over at Lucina and said, “You really don’t feel like going home yet, do you? The night is still young. Don’t be an early bird on me,” he teased her.

  Lucina chuckled wearily. She said, “Tonight, I will have to be an early bird. I’m exhausted, Ivan. I don’t remember meeting this many important people in one room, in one night, in my life. I mean, I’ve met more wealthy people before, but not all at once.”

  Ivan reached out to hold her hand in his anyway.

  He said, “Are you sure you don’t want to lie down and rest with the birthday boy?”

  “Ivan, your birthday was last week. And I did come over and share it with you.” She said, “Have you forgotten my company already, and the pink dress that I wore just for you?”

  Ivan acted as if he had amnesia. He frowned and answered, “Pink dress? Birthday last week? What are you talking about?”

  “Nice try, Ivan. But I’m going home now to go to bed. I’ll call you when I get home.”

  Ivan sighed. It was no use. Lucina refused to break down for him.

  “All right, so, call me when you get in,” he told her as he climbed out of the car.

  “I will.”

  “Good night, Mr. David,” the chauffeur told him.

  Ivan nodded and said, “Good night,” but he was hardly finished yet. He had energy still left over. So as soon as he made it to the elevator doors inside his apartment building, he called up Ashley.

  “Hey, are you still down here?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know, why? I shouldn’t be,” she pouted.

  He said, “But you are. So stop complaining and come on over here and see me like you know you want to.”

  Ashley paused and thought it over. But there was no hiding her true feelings. She said, “I felt really proud of you tonight. That was really a special event for you. I just wish that I could be the one at the center of attention.”

  Ivan told her, “You are. I mean, just think about it. Out of all those people there to see me tonight, you’re the only one who gets to spend the night with me.”

  She joked, “You would spend the night with other guys?”

  Ivan said, “Come on, now. Don’t turn something special into something silly.”

  Ashley said, “But that’s just it, I don’t feel special with you, Ivan. I’m always the side chick. And I don’t like that.”

  Ivan took another breath and lost his patience with her. He rubbed his temples with his free hand and said, “Man, after all this shit I put together tonight, I still gotta beg a pretty girl to spend the night with me. Is that how I’m living? Because if it is, then I’m about to take a nice walk downtown and find somebody who wants to give a handsome young man a birthday present.”

  Ashley chuckled at him. She said, “You’re spoiled, Ivan. That’s what your problem is.”

  “Yeah, well, let me know what you’re gonna do,” he told her.